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Content planning and creation is a time-consuming process. And then there’s the matter of what to say and what graphics to pair with it. If you’re creating it all yourself, it can be a bearish chore.
There are generally two approaches to the content marketing beast: The obsessive planners and the spaghetti throwers. You might be surprised to know that there are benefits to both.
Pre-planned content lends itself to the greater content marketing strategy while the spaghetti strategy can yield more raw, authentic content that gets better engagement.
But there’s always the chance that it could also be hot garbage.
So what’s the best approach for you? It’s actually a combination of both strategic planning and the fluidity to pivot as the need arises. If you plan your content too far out, you can get locked into a plan, and any drastic changes can gum up the works.
Here are a few things to consider as you plan the planning of your content strategy.
How Many Places Is Your Content Deployed?
If you JUST post on LinkedIn, that simplifies things for you and gives you more flexibility. Planning a week or two in advance is feasible and can easily be worked into your regular workload.
A more thorough content marketing strategy will be deployed across multiple platforms, but each social platform has its own idiosyncratic requirements. Enter more planning and more time!
There are hashtags guidelines, post length, emoji use, graphic style, and size, where you can put links, and how it’s best to implement a call to action. Then there is your blog, email newsletter, text promos, YouTube videos, and podcast episodes.
Yeah, it can be a lot. If you’re utilizing all of these channels, a content plan is essential. Planning at least a month in advance is highly recommended for a complex strategy involving multiple platforms.
How Many Content Pieces Do You Need Per Week?
How many times a day or week you post will dictate how many captions, graphics, emails, and articles you have to create to match the output. Posting once a day in three places is 21 separate pieces of content.
There are helpful tools and content planners like Later and HootSuite, which allow you to create and schedule your content all in one place. However, this doesn’t automatically optimize your content for each platform. You still have to do that yourself.
Content such as evergreen email sequences is created once but deployed over time, usually automatically through workflows and email software like MailChimp and ActiveCampaign.
Content Waterfall for Increased Traffic
Work smarter, not harder with content repurposing. An article you post on your blog or website today is tomorrow’s email blast about your great article. It’s also what your social posts talk about, with links pointing to your article.
Go a layer deeper and use your YouTube videos or podcast episodes to inspire the article and all of a sudden, your message is spread around like butter on hot toast. The planning was easy! You only had to plan one piece of content, and the rest was planned for you.
This drives more traffic to your website and creates cohesive messaging across all platforms. And it makes you look good, too!
What Are Your Marketing Objectives?
Do you have big goals this year? Big plans? Is there a product or course launch coming up? What are your revenue goals?
All of these questions play into how you will plan and create your content. Content marketing is playing the long game. And you need a lot of content to make it a success.
Remember the spaghetti-against-the-wall strategy? That’s great for Instagram and Facebook Stories, which give space for more authentic, “in the moment” content. But anything like a feed post, weekly emails and articles, landing pages, ad copy, and any visual media content requires some detailed planning.
Content marketing is a nurture strategy for building familiarity and trust with your target audience. Consumers feel more comfortable buying from you or cruising your content. When you show up in all the places they love, this increases their awareness and likelihood to buy from you.
Monthly planning is highly recommended as the standard for basic content planning. However, outlining a high-level view of your marketing goals for the quarter and the year is even better. This will help you strategize the vast amount of monthly or weekly content into bite-sized pieces while still working towards those goals.
Unsurprisingly, Content Marketing Requires a Lot of Content
There’s just no way around it: Unless you have eight arms, unlimited caffeine, and an army of copywriters and content writers, it’s a time suck you don’t need to be stuck on. If you want to leverage my army of content and copywriters that are skilled and ready, let’s chat!
